Hello and welcome to the Geeky Brummie Film Roundup! Each week we run through the biggest new cinema releases and why you should be excited for them. This week: brides, beavers, beer and blinders…
Usual disclaimer: unless otherwise stated, I haven’t seen these movies yet so all of my opinions are based on trailers, early reviews and other rumours and buzz.
The Bride!
What do you get when you combine Best Actress Oscar frontrunner Jessie Buckley and 9-Oscar-nominated Frankenstein? The Bride! is a new take on the iconic character first brought to life in 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein, written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Buckley plays the eponymous Bride, reanimated in 1930s Chicago by Frankenstein’s associate Dr Euphronius (Annette Bening) as a wife for his Monster (Christian Bale). As the undead duo figuratively and literally start to paint the town red, they attract the attention of the police (Peter Sarsgaard) and bring about radical social change.
This is Gyllenhaal’s second spin behind the camera after 2021’s The Lost Daughter, which earned her an Oscar nomination for Adapted Screenplay (and also starred Buckley and Sarsgaard). The trailer reminds me a little of Cruella, which took an iconic female villain and put her front and centre in a more modern setting with a distinctly more punk rock attitude. The Chicago setting here looks vividly realised, with heaving nightclubs and shady back-alleys giving the star monsters an opportunity to let loose and explore their identities.
Buckley and Bale are both well cast. The Bride is a tragic figure brought back from the dead, and Jessie Buckley has the depth to convey that sadness behind her eyes, but this version also gives her anger and a rebellious spirit which Buckley also brings in spades. Bale, meanwhile, gives Frankenstein’s Monster a sophisticated maturity even when smashing people against a wall. The cast also includes Penélope Cruz and Gyllenhaal’s brother Jake.
This looks like great fun, and continues a strong season for Buckley that looks very likely to end with a gold statuette in a couple of weeks.
- The Bride! on IMDB
- The Bride! on Rotten Tomatoes
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man
After a six-season run, Peaky Blinders has become the first thing that comes to many people’s minds when they think of Birmingham, especially now that Netflix has brought it to audiences across the pond who might not otherwise have come across our lovely city. Creator Steven Knight has also become one of the biggest champions of filmmaking in Birmingham, using the clout that the show gave him to get the Digbeth Loc Studios built (where some of this movie was filmed). In short, Peaky Blinders is both a significant driving force behind Birmingham’s film industry and one of its most successful products, meaning The Immortal Man has already been immortalised in the city’s cultural heritage.
The film picks up several years after the series left the story. Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) is in a self-imposed exile during the early years of World War II, but finds himself dragged back to his old life to confront his old legacy. There are several returning characters in the cast, including Stephen Graham’s Hayden Stagg, Sophie Rundle’s Ada Thorne (née Shelby), and Tommy’s son Erasmus, now running the Peaky Blinders and played as an adult by Barry Keoghan. The show has always attracted some big names to its supporting cast, so also joining for the big screen outing alongside Keoghan are Tim Roth and Rebecca Ferguson.
While the broad strokes of the plot are nothing new (retired criminal returns to the world he thought he’d left behind to protect his legacy), the WWII backdrop raises the stakes and grounds the story in one of the country’s best-known periods of history. Some of the story takes its cues from real life secret missions that took place during the war, with Roth’s character trying to recruit Erasmus and the Peaky Blinders to the Nazi cause. And if that ever starts to feel too educational, there are plenty of guns, explosions, and threatening looks from the shadow of a flat cap to keep the excitement levels ratcheted up.
Fans of the series won’t want to miss this chance to see Tommy Shelby’s story continue on the big screen. And if you haven’t watched the show yet, you can catch up on iPlayer or Netflix, with the film releasing to the streaming service just a fortnight after it hits the cinema.
- Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man on IMDB
- Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man on Rotten Tomatoes
Hoppers
When scientists at her university develop a way to plant a human consciousness inside a hyper-realistic robot animal, teenage student Mabel (Piper Curda) ‘hops’ into a beaver body to explore the natural world. She quickly finds that she can talk with other animals, and that they have their own rules and society currently under threat from slimy Mayor Jerry’s (Jon Hamm) big development plans. Mabel manages to persuade the animals to defend their world – but has she pushed them too far?
This is the first of two Pixar films out this year, and by comparison to the franchise behemoth that is Toy Story 5, Hoppers has had relatively little fanfare. But an original Pixar story is always something to treasure, and it looks like Hoppers is no different. Mabel’s excitement at being able to talk to animals is immediately infectious and the film has a lot of fun figuring out what wild animals might have to talk about. Bobby Moynihan’s beaver King George, with his mysterious little crown and encyclopaedic knowledge of every animal’s name, is already shaping up to be a classic Pixar character. And the animation is pretty gorgeous – it’s easy to take it for granted now, but all the different fur and feather textures, the autumnal colour palette of the American wilderness, and the heaps of character in every facial expression are all beautifully rendered.
Hoppers is getting great reviews, with an impressive 95% on Rotten Tomatoes at time of writing. Like all great Pixar films, this will entertain kids and parents alike.
- Hoppers on IMDB
- Hoppers on Rotten Tomatoes
Mother’s Pride
After losing their mother, the grieving and bickering Harley family have to put their differences aside and come together to start brewing real ale. If they can win the Great British Beer Awards, it might be enough to save their pub, and with it the soul of their village.
This has the feel of a good-natured British comedy, rooted in the quirks of English village life – the sort of thing that Mark Addy and Martin Clunes could do in their sleep. If the sight of Addy dressed as a Morris dancer doesn’t tell you all you need to know then the fact that it’s written and directed by Nick Moorcroft – the writer of Fisherman’s Friends and St Trinian’s – will probably fill in any gaps. The cast also includes such other British comedy stalwarts as James Buckley and Miles Jupp, as well as Jonno Davies, Luke Treadaway and Gabriella Wilde.
If you’re looking for something relaxed and heartwarming this weekend, then this is the film for you.
- Mother’s Pride on IMDB
- Mother’s Pride on Rotten Tomatoes
If you only see one film this week…
This is Geeky Brummie, after all – go watch Peaky Blinders!
Still in cinemas and worth a watch
- Scream 7
- Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
- Cold Storage – This is a really fun little movie with hugely likeable turns from Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell. Some of the CGI is a bit shoddy but the impressively icky practical effects more than make up for it. Special mention goes to the makeup work on Aaron Heffernan’s character, who starts off pretty unpleasant and gets progressively more disgusting (inside and out) as the film goes on. Liam Neeson is having a great time too, even if his big action scene is largely spent lying down with a bad back. Well worth catching while you can.
Trailer of the Week
As well as bringing us into the DC Universe and heralding a new boy in blue with David Corenswet’s Supes, last year’s Superman movie introduced us to Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner – the big screen’s first live action Green Lantern since the awful Ryan Reynolds movie. Sporting a fetching bowl-cut and demolishing tanks with giant green middle-fingers, Fillion managed to make the Lantern Corps cool again, paving the way for the upcoming HBO series Lanterns. The show stars the always-excellent Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan – the same Lantern previously played by Reynolds, here a grizzled veteran training up new recruit John Stewart (Aaron Pierre). But as they investigate a murder down on Earth, it’s clear that their dynamic is not as friendly as you might want from our planet’s defenders. Can they put aside their differences to solve the case? It’s unclear how this fits into the wider DCU – Hal mentions in the trailer that he’s the only human Lantern, suggesting it takes place in a different time or different universe to the equally human Guy Gardner, but Fillion does appear to be in the cast according to IMDB. Hopefully though that won’t matter, as this looks like a fun premise without the need to tie it into a bigger story. The cast also includes Ulrich Thomsen as classic Green Lantern villain Sinestro and Kelly Macdonald as a local sheriff who clearly has history with Hal Jordan. We’ll find out more when Lanterns comes to HBO Max in August.
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